For the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, giving veterans access to information that is both clear and easy to understand is crucial, not only to help veterans make informed decisions about their healthcare but also to improve overall patient satisfaction and outcomes. Last month, in support of its initiative to enhance veterans’ access to quality healthcare, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched Access to Care – an online tool that allows public access and transparency to key data to help veterans, their family members, and caregivers make more informed decisions about healthcare. What you might not have known is that this online tool is powered by Microsoft Azure Government and SQL Server technology.
Built and hosted in multiple Microsoft Azure Government regions, the VA’s Access to Care site features highly-scalable, public-facing websites, giving veterans and their families an online portal that combines and simplifies complex data such as new and established patient wait times, satisfaction scores for access to primary and specialty care, and timeliness of urgent appointments. By using the site, veterans and their families can also quickly compare their VA facility with others and, where possible, provide an easy comparison to private sector facilities.
In addition to running on Azure Government, Access to Care uses Bing Maps to identify and plot the nearest VA facility locations on a map. Users can zoom, pan, and select the pins for each facility for more information. Through this mobile device-enabled interface, the site can answer veterans’ questions, such as:
o How quickly can the VA see me?
o How well does my VA’s care compare to other hospitals?
o How satisfied are veterans with their access to care?
o How is the VA doing with access overall?
According to a VA press release, “This tool is another example of VA leading the way,” said Dr. Poonam Alaigh, Acting Undersecretary for Health. “No one in the private sector publishes data this way. This tool will instill a spirit of competition and encourage our medical facilities to proactively address access and quality issues while empowering Veterans to make choices according to what works best for them and their families.”
Dr. David J. Shulkin, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, reinforced in the press release the importance of this work, saying, “No other health-care system in the country releases this type of information on wait times. This allows Veterans to see how VA is performing.”
“The VA is actively embracing digital government and taking things to a whole new level. Through the power of cloud technology, we are able to take information of great importance to Veterans and our stakeholders, such as the Access to Care website, and make it directly available to our constituents. The Access to Care site is an example of the new types of tools the VA will be pursuing that will foster transparency and empower the Veteran and our constituents to help them understand how the VA as a whole is doing and their local VA as well when it comes to access and quality of care.” – Jack Bates, Director, OI&T Business Intelligence Service Line, Veterans Affairs
A VA blog post also states that the new access and quality web tool is a work in progress and will continue to evolve and improve as stakeholders provide feedback. Leveraging agile development methodology, the VA and Microsoft teams supporting this initiative are planning several development sprints throughout the next few months. Version 2.0 of the site went live on May 1.
Microsoft is proud to be part of the VA’s initiative to enable greater transparency and to enhance the way it supports veterans around the world. This work expands on Microsoft’s commitment to provide the VA with the deepest set of services, capabilities, and compliance standards to help it best achieve its mission. For example, in March, the VA issued a FedRAMP High agency ATO to Microsoft Azure Government—a critical step in the agency’s readiness to use the cloud. By building and hosting Access to Care on Azure Government, the VA is continuing to embrace digital modernization and improve its services for veterans around the world.
To learn more about Access to Care, visit www.accesstocare.va.gov. To see how Access to Care works, please visit a demo in the VA’s blog post.
This work is further proof that worldwide government agencies like the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs are choosing Microsoft as their partner to deepen their innovation and accelerate their digital transformation journey.
Microsoft offers the most complete, trusted, and secure cloud solution for our nearly 6 million government users across 7,000-plus federal, state and local organizations, empowering them to achieve more through digital transformation.
Broad support for regulatory compliance and ongoing innovation are at the core of Microsoft’s commitment to enabling U.S. government missions with a complete, trusted, and secure cloud platform. Today, we are announcing support for Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) requirements, expanding opportunities for defense contractors to take advantage of cloud computing in meeting the needs of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Adding DFARS compliance extends Azure Government’s lead as the cloud platform with the broadest support for U.S. DoD workloads. In addition to this compliance milestone, we are also announcing enhanced technical capabilities with the expansion of our Cognitive Services preview, addition of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) clusters, and the addition of new database and storage options in Azure Government. With these expanded compliance and service offerings, government customers will have new opportunities to use cloud computing to help meet their mission goals.
Supporting DFARS requirements
Azure Government’s support for DFARS requirements creates new options for DoD contractors as they partner with the defense department. DoD industry partners can now host Covered Defense Information (CDI) on the Microsoft cloud platform while maintaining compliance with DoD procurement requirements, giving them access to the same set of Azure Government capabilities as the DoD itself.
“As a mission partner of the DoD, the security of covered defense information is of utmost importance. Compliance with DFARS is not only required by regulation, but is also critical to the defense of our nation,” says Michael Hawman, General Atomics CIO, “As more DoD contractors consider the adoption of cloud computing to reduce costs and increase agility and capability, the transparency by which CSPs provide support will be critical to building and maintaining trust with cloud security in the defense contractor community. Commercial cloud service providers must familiarize themselves with, and be capable of accepting flow down DFARS requirements as soon as possible."
Cognitive Services available for all customers
Building on the successful preview of Cognitive Services in March, we are now making Cognitive Services available to all government and defense. Opening the preview up to more customers, U.S. government customers and partners can use Cognitive Services to feed real-time analysis that supports their mission objectives. Leveraging the artificial intelligence from Cognitive Services for things like facial recognition or text translation, customers can more easily build applications to help make informed decisions in critical scenarios such as Public Safety and Justice. Azure Government support for application innovation is part of why agencies are choosing Microsoft as their partner in digital transformation:
“Before beginning the search for specific technologies and digital platforms to meet DC’s digital needs, we identified our own list of standards for government cloud service providers. The first three criteria are compliance, reliability and the technical architecture and environment of the platform,” says Archana Vemulapalli, CTO of Washington D.C., “Microsoft offers a strong government cloud platform and services that help my staff and me perform our jobs effectively and create the city’s digital future.”
Announcing GPU clusters, Azure Cosmos DB and Cool Storage
Azure Government continues to add services at an accelerated pace to meet existing as well as unrealized needs of the U.S. government. By announcing GPU clusters today, Azure Government further enables the use of High Performance Computing (HPC) in the cloud for government. Whether using computational analysis to better research diseases and weather patterns or helping reduce backlogs of questions answered for citizens through predictive analysis, U.S. government customers and partners are sure to benefit.
Additionally, Azure Government now supports Azure Cosmos DB and Cool Blob Storage which enable government customers to deploy global-scale databases and choose from more options to control storage costs. Azure Cosmos DB is the next big leap in the evolution of DocumentDB and, as a part of this Azure Cosmos DB release, DocumentDB customers and their data automatically and seamlessly become Azure Cosmos DB customers. Additionally, we are making Cool Storage available so customers can store less frequently accessed data like backup data, media content, scientific data and active archival data at a reduced cost.
Powering innovation at the Department of Veterans Affairs
Agencies are choosing cloud computing and Azure Government to help speed innovation to those they serve. Last month, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs launched its Access to Care site on Azure Government. The site helps veterans and their caregivers decide where to go for healthcare services by providing data on patient satisfaction, appointment wait times, and other quality measures from surrounding clinics and VA facilities. Already, the VA has been able to meet the demand, while enhancing the website and continuously adding new functionality by leveraging the capabilities of Azure Government.
“The VA is focused on driving transparency and empowering the veteran,” said Jack Bates, Director VA OI&T Business Intelligence Service Line, “Working closely with Microsoft to deliver the Patient Wait Times App on Azure Government, we have enabled the Department to be fully transparent about performance, and to improve service to the veteran by providing meaningful data.”
By building and hosting Access to Care on Azure Government, which achieved a FedRAMP High ATO from the VA in March, the VA is continuing to embrace digital transformation and improve its services for veterans around the world.
Cloud computing for U.S. Government
From increased support for compliance requirements to application innovation, Azure Government continues to expand capabilities that make it easier for U.S. government customers and partners to take advantage of the cloud. And with six announced government regions in the U.S., Azure Government enables customers to run mission workloads closer to their users and provides geographic redundancy that is not possible with any other major cloud provider.
Microsoft Gets the Pentagon’s Highest Cloud Security Rating for Unclassified Data
By Phil Goldstein as written on fedtechmagazine.com
Last month, the Defense Department gave Microsoft’s Azure Government cloud platform its highest certification in terms of security for unclassified data.
In a company blog post, Tom Keane, general manager for Microsoft Azure, noted that Azure Government is “the first commercial cloud service to be awarded an Information Impact Level 5 DoD Provisional Authorization by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).”
Such an authorization allows all DOD customers to use Azure Government for the most sensitive controlled unclassified information (CUI), including CUI of National Security Systems. FCW reports that Microsoft already held FedRAMP High, FedRAMP Moderate and FedRAMP Accelerated approvals under the General Services Administration's Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.
“This achievement is the result of the collective efforts of Microsoft, DISA and its mission partners to work through requirements pertaining to the adoption of cloud computing for infrastructure, platform and productivity across the DOD enterprise,” Keane noted.
ACHIEVING A HIGH LEVEL OF CLOUD SECURITY
According to a March 2016 DISA guide on cloud computing security guidelines, “CUI is information the federal government creates or possesses that a law, regulation, or governmentwide policy requires, or specifically permits, an agency to handle by means of safeguarding or dissemination controls.”
CUI can encompass numerous kinds of information, including unclassified information concerning items, commodities, technology, software, or other information whose export could reasonably be expected to adversely affect U.S. national security and nonproliferation objectives.
This includes dual-use items; items identified in Export Administration Regulations, International Traffic in Arms Regulations and the munitions list; license applications; and sensitive nuclear technology information.
CUI can also include Personally Identifiable Information, Protected Health Information; and other data requiring explicit CUI designation (i.e., For Official Use Only, Official Use Only, Law Enforcement Sensitive, Critical Infrastructure Information, and Sensitive Security Information).
Level 4 authorization accommodates CUI or other mission critical data, according to DISA. Level 5 accommodates CUI that requires a higher level of protection than that afforded by Level 4 as deemed necessary by the information owner, public law or other government regulations. Level 5 also supports unclassified National Security Systems (NSSs) due to the inclusion of NSS specific requirements in the FedRAMP +Control and Control Enhancements.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE CLOUD SECURITY AUTHORIZATION
Microsoft has had to set up separate cloud infrastructure to achieve the certification. Keane noted that Information Impact Level 5 “requires processing in dedicated infrastructure that ensures physical separation of DOD customers from non-DoD customers.”
Keane added that DOD authorizing officials can use the Azure Government authorization “as a baseline for input into their authorization decisions on behalf of mission owner systems using the Azure Government cloud DOD Region.”
According to FCW, “the company said it has built multiple data centers to provide DOD with exclusive services for Azure and Office 365 U.S. Government Defense services.”
Over the past few months, Microsoft ran a preview program with more than 50 customers across the Pentagon, including all branches of the military, unified combatant commands and defense agencies.
“We are thrilled to announce the general availability of the DOD Region to all validated DoD customers,” Keane said. “Key services covering compute, storage, networking and database are available today with full service level agreements and dedicated Azure Government support.”
Katell Thielemann, research director for the public sector and U.S. federal government at Gartner, told MeriTalk that the approval is significant for both industry and the government “in that it sends a strong signal that companies like Microsoft are taking both security and Federal-specific requirements very seriously.”
“The FedRAMP and DISA review processes are stringent, lengthy, and costly. Federal agencies, and the DoD specifically, are looking for ways to leverage all the benefits of the cloud, but their mission environments demand high levels of data protection and security,” Thielemann said.
The U.S. Navy is using drone boat swarms to keep harbors safe
The U.S. Navy is testing a team of drone boats to protect harbors here and abroad. The boats, which are basically autonomous versions of the Rigid Hull Inflatable, are connected to a AI routing system called CARACaS. In original 2014 tests the boats worked separately to protect ships in a harbor and the new routing system now allows them to swarm as a team to surround and neutralize threats.
The system is also running an automatic vehicle identification system that allows the boats to assess friends and foes on the high seas.
Autonomous boats work well because, well, there isn’t much to hit in the ocean. These boats are especially useful in keeping unwanted boats away from Navy vessels and because they work in concert they can patrol a spot and then mass together to prevent a threat. The best thing? These aren’t special, custom-made boats. The Navy is simply outfitting standard boats with AI and control mechanisms and letting the loose making it far easier to retrofit older “dumb” boats and recruit them into the coming machine army.
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Eight new service offerings added to Azure Government certification scope
We are pleased to announce the addition of Azure Resource Manager, Automation, Azure Batch, Log Analytics, Azure Media Services, Policy Administration Service/RBAC, Redis Cache, and Scheduler to certification scope in Microsoft Azure Government.
Each of these service offerings has received Joint Authorization Board (JAB) approval for addition to Azure Government’s P-ATO at the High Impact Level. With the addition of these eight offerings, the total number of Azure Government offerings that meet the FedRAMP High baseline grows to 26 services; 20 more services than AWS GovCloud.
These services may be used by Federal, DoD and state and local government customers and partners building solutions on Azure Government who are required to meet rigorous compliance standards such as FedRAMP High, DISA L4, CJIS, ITAR, and IRS 1075. The Azure Blueprint program is designed to facilitate the secure and compliant use of these and other Azure Government service offerings by providing solution accelerators and guidance concerning customer security responsibilities when architecting solutions in Azure.
About these services
Azure Resource Manager –Azure Resource Manager (ARM) enables you to repeatedly deploy your app and have confidence your resources are deployed in a consistent state. You define the infrastructure and dependencies for your app in a single declarative template. This template is flexible enough to use for all of your environments such as test, staging or production.
You put resources with a common lifecycle into a resource group that can be deployed or deleted in a single action. You can see which resources are linked by a dependency. You can apply tags to resources to categorize them for management tasks, such as billing as well as control who in the organization can perform actions on the resources by defining roles for users and groups. ARM logs all user actions so you can audit those actions.
Automation –Azure Automation uses Windows PowerShell scripts and workflows – known as runbooks – to handle the creation, deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of Azure resources and third-party applications. Automation runbooks work with Web Apps in Azure App Service, Azure Virtual Machines (Windows or Linux), Azure Storage, Azure SQL Database, and any service that offers public Internet APIs.
Azure Batch –Azure Batch makes it easy to run large-scale parallel and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads in Azure. Use Batch to scale out parallel workloads, manage the execution of tasks in a queue, and cloud-enable applications to offload compute jobs to the cloud.
Log Analytics –Log Analytics is a service in Operations Management Suite that helps you collect and analyze data generated by resources in your cloud and on-premises environments. It gives you real-time insights using integrated search and custom dashboards to readily analyze millions of records across all of your workloads and servers regardless of their physical location.
Azure Media Services – Azure Media Services offers broadcast-quality video streaming services to reach larger audiences on today’s most popular mobile devices. With features that enhance accessibility, distribution, and scalability, Media Services makes it easy and cost-effective to stream and protect your content to audiences both local and worldwide.
Policy Administration Service/RBAC – Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enables fine-grained access management for Azure. Using RBAC, you can grant only the amount of access that users need to perform their jobs.
Redis Cache – Based on the popular open source Redis cache—Redis Cache gives you access to a secure, dedicated cache for your Azure application usage. It leverages the low-latency, high-throughput capabilities of the Redis engine. This separate, distributed cache layer allows your data tier to scale independently for more efficient use of compute resources in your application layer.
Scheduler – Azure Scheduler lets you invoke actions that call HTTP/S endpoints or post messages to a storage queue on any schedule. You can use Scheduler to create jobs that reliably call services either inside or outside of Azure and run those jobs on demand, on a regular or irregular schedule, or at a future date.
Azure is dedicated to expanding the number of offerings available to government customers and will continue to provide updates through our blog as well as adding covered offerings to the Microsoft Trust Center.
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The Government Will See You Now: A Private Sector Solution for Public Sector Problems
There’s a long-standing belief out there that governments, and government websites in particular, could do a better job of providing access and information to the public. Fueled by their experiences with private industry, citizens no longer have the patience for anything less than immediate access to information and total visibility into the status of their inquiries. This can be a high standard to meet, especially for smaller governmental bodies, but the truth is these expectations are justified.
Here’s how a few forward-thinking government agencies are modernizing the way they do business and easing the customer journey in an effort to improve relations with their constituents.
The city council for Sunderland in the United Kingdom handles more than 700 separate services for its 280,000 citizens. Until recently, attempts to reach the correct city personnel required numerous calls, and citizens had to repeat their basic information and reason for calling each time. The process needed to be streamlined, but without reducing the number of services offered.
The city council found a solution in customer relationship management (CRM) tools that allow agents at the first point of contact to quickly confirm the caller’s needs and transfer the inquiry and pertinent personal data to the proper department. Multiple requests can be made in one call, and city employees can check on the status of any inquiry regardless of department.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States, the manual processing of individual event permits rapidly became outdated when the 2012 Democratic National Convention rolled into town, bringing with it 35,000 delegates and attendees. The city needed both automation and the ability to affordably handle large volumes of traffic—and a long deployment timeframe was out of the question.
Opting for a scalable, cloud-based, and self-service permitting portal was the clever choice. Now when large events are hosted in Charlotte, extra server space can quickly be allotted to meet demand. Equally helpful is the new central event management knowledge base, which allows city employees to quickly answer event-related questions and save past event parameters for the next time an organization comes to town.
From water to electricity to waste removal, every department in the US city of Grand Rapids, Michigan has long striven to put the people first. The problem was, each department had worked out its own system over time, resulting in longer hold times and higher administrative costs across the board.
Declaring “One Call to City Hall” their new motto, local authorities replaced their disparate old systems with a unified, CRM-driven solution they call Grand Rapids 311. Now citizens and staff have access to a unified knowledge base covering all departments. Since their CRM implementation began, Grand Rapids has seen answer times plummet from 6 minutes to 22 seconds, leading to a budgetary savings of more than $600,000 in the solution's second year.
From public safety to healthcare and education, government entities now have access to tools capable of easing public access to services and streamlining workflows to the highest private sector standards. If you’re looking for a solution that can reduce stress for your citizens while helping your department be leaner and more responsive, check out the tools available from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And for a more in-depth perspective, read our white paper, Engaging and Serving Citizens.
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The Government Will See You Now: A Private Sector Solution for Public Sector Problems
There’s a long-standing belief out there that governments, and government websites in particular, could do a better job of providing access and information to the public. Fueled by their experiences with private industry, citizens no longer have the patience for anything less than immediate access to information and total visibility into the status of their inquiries. This can be a high standard to meet, especially for smaller governmental bodies, but the truth is these expectations are justified.
Here’s how a few forward-thinking government agencies are modernizing the way they do business and easing the customer journey in an effort to improve relations with their constituents.
The city council for Sunderland in the United Kingdom handles more than 700 separate services for its 280,000 citizens. Until recently, attempts to reach the correct city personnel required numerous calls, and citizens had to repeat their basic information and reason for calling each time. The process needed to be streamlined, but without reducing the number of services offered.
The city council found a solution in customer relationship management (CRM) tools that allow agents at the first point of contact to quickly confirm the caller’s needs and transfer the inquiry and pertinent personal data to the proper department. Multiple requests can be made in one call, and city employees can check on the status of any inquiry regardless of department.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, in the United States, the manual processing of individual event permits rapidly became outdated when the 2012 Democratic National Convention rolled into town, bringing with it 35,000 delegates and attendees. The city needed both automation and the ability to affordably handle large volumes of traffic—and a long deployment timeframe was out of the question.
Opting for a scalable, cloud-based, and self-service permitting portal was the clever choice. Now when large events are hosted in Charlotte, extra server space can quickly be allotted to meet demand. Equally helpful is the new central event management knowledge base, which allows city employees to quickly answer event-related questions and save past event parameters for the next time an organization comes to town.
From water to electricity to waste removal, every department in the US city of Grand Rapids, Michigan has long striven to put the people first. The problem was, each department had worked out its own system over time, resulting in longer hold times and higher administrative costs across the board.
Declaring “One Call to City Hall” their new motto, local authorities replaced their disparate old systems with a unified, CRM-driven solution they call Grand Rapids 311. Now citizens and staff have access to a unified knowledge base covering all departments. Since their CRM implementation began, Grand Rapids has seen answer times plummet from 6 minutes to 22 seconds, leading to a budgetary savings of more than $600,000 in the solution's second year.
From public safety to healthcare and education, government entities now have access to tools capable of easing public access to services and streamlining workflows to the highest private sector standards. If you’re looking for a solution that can reduce stress for your citizens while helping your department be leaner and more responsive, check out the tools available from Microsoft Dynamics CRM. And for a more in-depth perspective, read our white paper, Engaging and Serving Citizens.
We are excited to announce the general availability of theAzure Import/Export Servicein Microsoft Azure Government. The Import/Export service allows migration of large amounts of data in and out of Azure blob storage by shipping hard disk drives directly to the datacenter. This service is suitable in situations where you want to transfer several TBs of data in or out of Azure Storage, but uploading or downloading over the network is not feasible due to limited bandwidth or high network costs. Some scenarios where this service can be used are data seeding, content distribution, recurring data update, offsite backup, disaster recovery.
Benefits of using Azure Import Export
Fast: We recommend using Azure Import/Export if loading data over the network would take 7 days or more. Shipping disks directly to the data center can save weeks or more off of network transfer time.
Secure: Data is secured by Bitlocker encryption. The keys are securely uploaded using SSL REST-API and do not travel along with the disk.
Reliable: The client tool has internal checksum logic to maintain data integrity. Various verbosity of logging is available directly in customer storage accounts making this process highly reliable.
While all import/export functionality is available, we currently only support the REST API interface for creation and management of import/export jobs in Azure Government.The Portal experience for Import/Export jobswill come in the new portal later this year. See below for details and samples for getting started with import jobs via the REST API.
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Microsoft Gets the Pentagon’s Highest Cloud Security Rating for Unclassified Data
